Fabric

I knew you would regret the moon-vault,
bloody splendor of your clothes, though
snug in the bolts
of silken medusas,
and mitochondrial geishas scaling the
bluffs of your shoulders,
soon your
riffs of breath were to became
madrigals of speech
the secret coil of your signature was a tide of wraiths
a matrix of gnomes,
petrified eyes and cabochon bones curling
with a kind of muzzled, bardic energy,
everything you touched pulsed with the
motion of the dark;
polluted vision was a result of
ghosts holding hands in the hammock of your eyes
the tops of trees were transformed by aureoles of
soot
seraphs stumbling about your ribs
found body, vice, and lever
on the acre of your faithlessness,
everything was fated for the sewer of limbo,
but your costumes would stay
your civil gabardines, claret robe,
scabbard of chambray webbed with
folkgods
your shrouds of rosebud
were not only girlish entreaties
to love but armaments
against the assertion of grief,
new in the envelope of your satins
I am struck by the reefed glint
of your strength, to wreck
the eating silence;
You, anatomist of clouds
You, foundling of oceanic dark,
editing, editing these
treasures of the perpetual

Afshan Shafi lives in Lahore, Pakistan and has studied English Literature and International Relations at The University of Buckingham and Regent’s University London. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Clinic, Ala Champ Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, ditch, Full of Crow, New Asian Writing, I am not a silent poet, The Toucan, Mad Swirl, Visual Verse, Black Heart Magazine, and others. Her debut chapbook of poems Odd Circles was published by Readings (Pakistan) in 2014. She is the founding editor of the forthcoming Abbreviate Journal. Website: http://afshanshafi.com.